Landscaping At Long Last

Some of the ugliest things about our house when we bought it were the yard and the landscaping. Treating and fertilizing the grass for the last three years have really helped turn the yard around, but obviously did nothing for the landscaping. So, after spending the last few years working almost exclusively inside the house, we decided to get going on the outside.

The first step was to establish a plan. Little known fact: Purdue has a Landscape Architecture program. Cool, huh? Well, luckily for us, one of my friends went through the program and went to work in Indy after graduation. She was kind enough to design a complete landscape plan for us with her only payments being a few dinners and our eternal gratitude. The design was wonderful and included a great mix of plants that make for a great new look. It's also so great that we can't afford to do it all at once. So we decided to break it up into phases and go from there. Phase one, which this post is about, involves just the front with a little prep work in the back to get ready for additional work later.

(And yeah, I'm not going to show the plan on here. I'd hate to show it when we aren't sure when we'll do more or even what all we'll end up doing. Chekhov would not be pleased, and I don't want to make him mad... I hear he has a gun.)

We started off by having a local contractor rip out a bunch of stuff in the front of the house and in the back yard. This included a bunch of bushes, rocks, pavers, and dirt in the front, plus a weird landscape bed, a paver patio, and a hot tub pad in the back (we'd also had a bunch of landscaping blocks piled on the paver patio for a few years that we wanted gone too, but instead of paying our landscaper to throw them away we had the guys from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore come get them: free stuff for them + and free remove for us = win win!). Then we had them reshape the bed in the front per the new design. It now has a curve in the front of the house and then runs around the fence on the side to the gate. At the end of the day (well, two days of work actually) we had a great blank slate to work with.

Before

Before

Before

After

Also after, and sort of in process

Our next step was to put down landscape fabric and then plant. We followed the design pretty closely, which meant we ended up with a lot: seven Dwarf Burning Bushes, seven Green Velvet Boxwoods, four Dwarf Korean Lilacs, one River Birch, one Japanese Maple, six Apenglow Geraniums, six Coreopsis, plus a bunch of annuals. That's a lot of plants. So, over the course of a few days (since we got different plants from different places depending on best prices and availability), we got to planting. It was a lot of work, but it's nice to be able to see immediate results like planting plants provides. We got about the smallest sizes we could find, since it's a lot cheaper this way and we had a lot to get. Plus we figure that we'll be here long enough to really see things grow and fill in the space. After all that we mulched, which really gives the beds a nice, finished look.

Hello Leo!

For our final step, I installed a drip irrigation system on a timer. This will help keep all our lovely little plants alive, plus it makes my life a lot easier if I don't have to worry about taking time to water by hand. Plus, since the bed along the side of the fence comes pretty close to the garden, I went ahead and tied the drip irrigation in with the veggies too. So now hopefully our landscaping and this year's garden will all do well.

It's kinda hard to see, but there's tubing running to all the plants

So there you have it, the first phase of our grand landscaping makeover. It was pretty dated and rough before, but now it looks so nice. We kept everything trimmed and weeded, so it wasn't that bad, but it definitely needed the help. Now we've got fresh plants and a whole new look - hopefully the remaining phases go as smoothly and produce such great results. I've still got a few tweaks to make to the irrigation system and then cover it with mulch, but otherwise I think that's it for this round. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Garden Time Again

Last year we had a lot of fun and success with our garden. We wanted to give it another shot this year and even expanded a bit. Previously we started off with a building project to make ourselves a raised garden bed. It worked so well for us that we decided to build another bed this time around. Now we've doubled our growing space and can hopefully have double the results.

We finally got around to planting last week. Since some things worked better than others last year, we decided to focus on what we liked and what worked. This meant tomatoes, chilies, squash, and herbs. But you can see the full layout below...

And that does it for this round. Thanks for reading and wish little plants good luck!